1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to systems for creating and editing video and, more specifically, to systems that integrate hyperlink information with video.
2. Related Art
Hypermedia is a term used to describe the fusion of two other new technologies: multimedia and hypertext. Multimedia refers to information forms containing text, images, graphics, audio and video. A hypertext document is one which is linked to other documents via hyperlinks. A hyperlink often appears in a hypertext document as a piece of highlighted text. The text is usually a word or phase describing something of which a user might want further information. When the user activates the hyperlink, typically by clicking on it using a mouse, a link command is initiated; which causes a program at the linked address to be executed; which, in turn, causes the user's view to be updated so as to show the linked document, which typically contains more information on the highlighted word or phase concerned. Such information may be in the form of text, audio, video, a two-dimensional image or a three-dimensional image. Hyperlinks make it easy to follow cross-references between documents. Hypermedia documents are hypertext documents with multimedia capabilities. The regions on the screen which are active hyperlinks are called hot-links.
Nowadays, most people are familiar with the application of hypertext by using a mouse to click on hot-links on computer displays of homepages from the World Wide Web (the Web) on the Internet. Data on the Web is located via URLs. URL stands for “Uniform Resource Locator.” It is a draft standard for specifying an object on the Internet. It specifies access method and the location for the files. Documents on the Web are written in a simple “markup language” called HTML, which stands for Hypertext Markup Language. File formats of data on the Web are specified as MIME formats; MIME stands for “Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.” (Reference: http://www.oac.uci.edu/ indiv/ehood/MIME/MIME.html). Examples of file formats on the Web are .au (probably the most common audio format), .html (HTML files), .jpg (JPEG encoded images), .mid (Midi music format), mpg (MPEG encoded video), and .ps (postcript files). While presently hypertext technology is most common in text and image media, it is beginning to also appear in animation and video.
HyperVideo is the name for video augmented with hyperlinks. NEC Corporation has demonstrated to Newsbytes such a system, named “video hypermedia system,” that will bring the point and click capabilities of hypertext to full motion video. A more detailed description of HyperVideo may be found in the article “NEC's Video Hypertext System”, Newsbytes News Network, Jul. 31, 1995.
HyperCafe is an experimental hypermedia prototype, developed as an illustration of a general hypervideo system. This program places the user in a virtual cafe, composed primarily of digital video clips of actors involved in fictional conversations in the cafe. HyperCafe allows the user to follow different conversations, and offers dynamic opportunities of interaction via temporal, spatio-temporal and textual links to present alternative narratives. A more detailed description of HyperCafe may be found in the article by Nitin “Nick” Sawhney, David Balcom and Ian Smith, “HyperCafe: Narrative and Aesthetic Properties of Hypervideo,” Hypertext '96: Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext (Recipient of the first Engelbart Best Paper Award at Hypertext '96 (Mar. 20, 1996), http://silver.skiles.gatech.edu/gallery/hyper cafe/HT96_Talk/.
VideoActive is an authoring tool for the creation of interactive movies. It uses the HyperVideo technology to identify hot-links in digital video files. The tool allows one to prepare video clips with the hot-link information and then to link them to other types of media. A more detailed description of VideoActive may be found in “HyperVideo Authoring Tool (User Notes)”, http://ephyx.com/, Pre-Release version, February 1996.
Progressive Networks, Inc. has included “click-able video maps” in their RealVideo technology. A mouse click on a portion of the video can cause a new video clip to be played, seek within the current clip, or send a URL message. They provide the RealPlayer which enables this interactivity. A more detailed description of RealVideo may be found at Progressive Network, Inc., “RealVideo Technical White Paper”, http://www.realaudio.com/products/realvideo/overview/index.html.
A feature shared by all these technologies is that the size of the hypervideo is huge. Basically, the hypervideo information contains both the encoded video and the hyperlink information. In order to augment hyperlink information to a video clip, one has to create a file that is larger than the original video file. In order to transmit hyperlink information one has to transmit a huge file, even if the receiver may have locally a copy of the original video file. Frequently a user may have a video file on a CD-ROM, and would like to augment hyperlink information to this video. With the existing technologies, the user would have to either generate a file or download an already generated file at least as large as the original.
With existing technology, the creation of hypervideo content is tedious because the hot information is encoded in each frame in which the hypervideo link exists.